


Never Say Never

by JuniperJones



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Bisexual Castiel (Supernatural), Dean Winchester in Drag, M/M, Openly Bisexual Dean Winchester, Valentine's Day Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-10
Updated: 2020-08-10
Packaged: 2021-03-05 21:35:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,557
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25822222
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JuniperJones/pseuds/JuniperJones
Summary: Castiel might suck at personal relationships but he prides himself on being thoughtful. Which is why he sends anonymous Valentine cards to all the unattached women he knows, just to make them feel special. This year is different though, because he has also sent a card to the only person he actually IS interested in. Sadly, the only one he’s received in return appears to be from his ex-wife.
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Smith (Supernatural)
Comments: 1
Kudos: 68





	Never Say Never

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, I know it’s not February but someone asked me for fluff a while ago, and I thought to myself ‘I don’t write fluff’, and then I was hunting through my computer files looking for a different story when I tripped over this one and realized ... um... I DID write some fluff once, fancy that 😂

Castiel Novak, the overworked - though at least not underpaid - CFO of the Sandover Bridge and Iron Company, checked his watch then looked at the pile of unfinished work on his desk and sighed heavily. His father had, suddenly and unexpectedly, declared a New Year’s resolution to take early retirement. Apparently he intended to sail the family yacht on an extended cruise with his formerly estranged sister, Aunt Amara. Castiel’s brothers, Mike and Luke, had been vying for the CEO position with a series of competing proposed acquisitions ever since. Their escalating endeavors had caused Castiel many sleepless nights for the last six weeks.

But perhaps their competition was finally drawing towards an inevitable conclusion because the Babylonian tower of paperwork on Castiel’s desk had finally shrunken to something manageable. It was six pm. If he got his head down he could probably clear at least half his in-tray before 10. He’d actually see the color of his desk for the first time since Christmas.

Instead guilt forced him to rise to his feet with a growl of irritation, and reach for his trench coat .

“Sir?” Hannah asked, her eyes as wide and startled as a deer’s as he stepped out of his office and slammed the door behind him with a resounding crash.  
  
“Haven’t you got a home to go to?” he snapped.  
  
For a moment she remained frozen in place, her brain obviously struggling to process the evidence of her eyes and ears, then she turned off her PC and jumped to her feet with the alacrity of someone convinced they’d fallen into the twilight zone but who still fully intended to enjoy the trip.  
  
“I’m leaving right now, Sir,” she babbled, as she grabbed her coat and purse and hurried after him towards the elevator.  
  
He just offered her a surly glare and told himself it was time to get himself a new PA. How the hell was he supposed to ever get any work done if the only way he could get the stubborn woman to go home on an evening was to leave the building himself?  
  
As the elevator descended, he sneaked a look inside her open purse. The red-sheathed offering was inside. She was perhaps intending to use it to blackmail her boyfriend into treating her better. Castiel couldn’t imagine Hannah being so willing to work over every night if she were in a _good_ relationship.  
  
Though he wasn’t sure she even _had_ a boyfriend to make jealous. Poor girl probably didn’t _ever_ get a Valentine’s card except his own.  
  
Well, unless Smith… no… patently ridiculous thought. Someone as gorgeous as Smith probably wouldn’t recognize a genuinely romantic gesture if it bit him in the ass.  
  
Though Castiel was realistic enough to accept that Hannah probably _thought_ her anonymous Valentine card came from the Armani-clad Marketing Manager rather than her stone-faced boss. Castiel rarely poked his head out of his office but increasingly of late, when he _did_ do so, he inevitably was greeted by the sight of Smith’s ass resting on the edge of Hannah’s desk as though he had nothing better to do than flirt with the woman.

So Hannah probably thought Smith was the one who had slipped the red envelope into her in-box.  
  
Certainly, she’d never suspect Castiel to be the one who ensured that each and every unmarried female in the company received a Valentine’s Day card. Just as none of Sandover’s 246 employees had ever worked out the identity of the office ‘Secret Santa’ either.

With a bit of luck even Amelia would think her card had come from some tall, dark-haired stranger and imagine her luck had changed. He definitely wished his _own_ card had come from a tall, dark-haired stranger rather than his estranged wife. If only so that he dared ignore the words written in anonymous black print inside it.  
  
“Honeybabes. 8pm. Be there, if you dare.”  
  
Honeybabes.  
  
God. Never marry a woman with a sense of black humor. Or, if you do, give her the goddamned divorce she’s asking for so she doesn’t use Valentine’s Day as an opportunity to embarrass you to death. Maybe that was it. She’d given up on the idea of a civilized divorce and was working on getting her hands on his life insurance policy instead.  
  
Or maybe she was simply trying to be ‘understanding’. Amelia wasn’t a cruel woman and subtlety had never been one of her strengths. Hell, she probably thought Honeybabes was one of his usual pick-up haunts and was trying to make him feel ‘at home’. He’d be insulted by the implication, if the whole situation weren’t so damned ironically funny.  
  
And, just in case he wasn’t already miserable enough, whom the hell should he bump into in the parking lot except the tech-Yeti, Sam pain-in-the-ass Wesson, who did an exaggerated double take, checked his watch and offered him a shit-eating smirk.  
  
“Leaving early, huh? Got a hot date tonight, Mr Novak?”  
  
Castiel just growled deep in his throat and stepped around him… only to collide into Dean Smith who’d been lurking invisibly behind Wesson’s overlarge body.  
  
“Sorry,” he barked, sounding anything but, as the flustered Marketing Manager tried to detach himself without letting go of the dog-eared red envelope clutched in his left hand.   
  
Some devil took possession of Castiel, twisting his face into an unfamiliar smile as he nodded at Smith’s hand. “Secret admirer?”  
  
Smith blushed a truly magnificent shade of scarlet and backed away, mumbling something under his breath that sounded suspiciously like “Oh, god, oh, god, why not trip and fall flat on your face, Dean, and make the humiliation complete?”  
  
Castiel walked away, whistling silently, his equilibrium totally restored. He might be on the way to the evening-from-hell with his soon-to-be ex-wife but at least he’d accidentally managed to cop a feel of a tall, sexy stranger en route.  
  
He drove home, wasted an hour trying to decide the appropriate attire to wear to a place like Honeybabes, decided it would serve Amelia right if he turned up in drag, then dressed in a conservative black turtle-neck and matching pants.  
  
Honeybabes was almost deserted when he entered, making it impossible for him to creep in surreptitiously through a crowd. So he just squared his shoulders, set his face in a cold ‘don’t even think of it’ expression and sat down at the bar.  
  
“Oooh, girlfriend, hot honey at three-o-clock,” someone squealed.  
  
“Oooh,” the indeterminately-sexed barkeep agreed, mincing down the bar in Castiel’s direction with a flutter of false eyelashes. “Whatever it is, blue eyes, it’s on the house.”  
  
Castiel glowered at him/her and pointedly slapped a twenty on the bar. “Coors,” he snapped.  
  
“The strong silent type, huh? That’s okay. It’s not your over-sized personality I’m interested in. I’m Lola.”  
  
“I’m waiting for my ex-wife,” Castiel retorted dryly.  
  
“Kinky,” Lola replied, with a wink, before gliding back down the bar on legs _far_ too good to belong to a female.  
  
Castiel decided he was going to _kill_ Amelia for this.  
  
He prided himself on his patience but at precisely 9.50, he decided he’d had enough. He reached into his jacket, withdrew his cell phone and rang her.  
  
“Where the hell are you?” he growled.  
  
There was a long silence on the end of the phone before Amelia took a deep breath and said, “And Happy Valentine’s Day to you too, Cas.”  
  
He blushed, averted his eyes from Lola’s curious stare and lowered his voice several decibels. “You said 8 o’clock,” he pointed out. “I’ve been sitting in a notorious drag-queen bar for nearly two hours now.”  
  
Another long, curious silence followed by, “I said I’d meet you there at 8 o’clock?”  
  
“That’s what you wrote in the card,” he snapped. “You said ‘Be there, if you dare’,” he reminded her irritably.  
  
“Ah,” she said. “Of course.”

“So are you ever planning to turn up or is this just your idea of a joke?”   
  
“I never sent you a card, Castiel,” she laughed gently. “I mean it’s nice that you still sent _me_ a card this year, but let’s face it you always send one to every unattached female you know, so I never mistook it for more than a sweet gesture on your part. So whoever sent you _your_ card is either a practical joker or a secret admirer. I’m sure it’s the latter though,” she added hurriedly. “And they obviously know you well, since they sent you to a ‘gay’ bar.”   
  
“It’s not a ‘gay’ bar. It’s a ‘drag-queen’ bar,” he growled. He didn’t mean to be an asshole about it. He genuinely believed in a live and let live philosophy and would be the first to protest in defence of the drag queens if anyone had the temerity to try to shut the bar down. Being theoretically supportive was not, however, the same as being enthusiastic. Cas was bisexual, but he liked his men to be _men_ and his women to be _women_ and if that made him a dinosaur then the blame was with his sexuality not his social conscience. The idea of a man in drag, while not offensive to him, did definitely not turn him on and feminine gay guys definitely turned him off. It wasn’t a judgement; simply a fact. “There’s a difference,” he insisted.  
  
“Of course there is,” she agreed blithely. “You get to have your cake and eat it.”  
  
“What?”  
  
“You can drool over a babe in a dress and then bed a guy with a dick. Seems like the perfect set-up for a bisexual, Cas,” she snickered.   
  
“I can’t believe you said that.”  
  
“Oh lighten up, Cas. This is your _wife_ you’re talking to here and you’re the last guy in the world who can claim your wife doesn’t understand you. Live a little. Take a chance. Maybe you’re finally about to meet Mr. Right.”  
  
“Not if he’s wearing a dress, I’m not,” Castiel snarled. What he liked in a man was muscles and strength. And, sure, Dean Smith had a model-perfect face and soft lips and a distressing tendency to eat salad, and drink smoothies and skinny lattes. But he was _all_ man. He’d once seen Smith out of work, at a discrete distance, and on that occasion Smith had been dressed in denim and leather like a quintessential ‘bad boy’. So Castiel _knew_ there was more to the guy than office suits and designer stubble.  
  
“Where’s your sense of adventure?” she laughed.   
  
“It drowned five beers ago when I met ‘Lola’.”  
  
“Lola?”  
  
“Never mind. Any minute now they’re going to start the ‘show’, so I’m going home.”  
  
“Coward.”  
  
“What did you call me?”  
  
“Think about it, Cas What if this _is_ a joke? Maybe whoever sent the card is sitting somewhere in that bar laughing their ass off at you, just dying to see you turn purple with embarrassment and storm out in a temper. So stay there, watch the show, and at least pretend to enjoy yourself. Then the joke’s on them, isn’t it?”  
  
Castiel decided it made sense, though after five beers on an empty stomach maybe _anything_ would make sense – and he wasn’t sure he liked the fact that Amelia clearly found the whole thing so amusing.  
  
“Are you sure you didn’t send the card?” he asked suspiciously.  
  
“If it makes you happy, I sent the card, okay?” she laughed. “Now I’m hanging up before _my_ date decides he’d have more chance of getting lucky at Honeybabes.”  
  
Castiel pocketed his cell-phone and frowned with suspicion. He hadn’t mentioned the name of the bar, had he? So how had Amelia known he was at Honeybabes? Lucky guess or proof she _had_ sent him the card? Hell, maybe she was trying to be romantic. Maybe sending your bisexual soon-to-be ex-husband to a drag-queen bar was considered an appropriate Valentine gesture in the crappy liberated women’s magazines that Amelia subscribed to.  
  
Or maybe this was Sam Wesson’s idea of a joke.  
  
Yes.  
  
That would explain the smirk and the ‘hot date’ comment.  
  
Either way, it was too late to change his mind about leaving. Somewhere between his fifth beer and the phone call, the bar had suddenly filled to capacity. There were so many heaving bodies blocking the way between the bar and the door that people were spilling out onto the sidewalk. Most of whom would probably take advantage of the darkness and close quarters to at least give him a quick grope if he tried to force his way through the throng.  
  
Which, of course, reminded him of the brief but enjoyable moment of body contact with Dean Smith in the parking lot. It should be a criminal offence for a man to have eyelashes _that_ long. Though ‘Lola’ certainly didn’t agree. Castiel had never seen so much mascara on one face before.  
  
Smith, of course, didn’t need mascara.  
  
Neither, come to think of it, did someone who looked like Smith need the kindness of an anonymous Valentine’s card from his boss to boost his ego.  
  
But he’d stood in that card shop, buying nonsensical cards for all the women in his life, and it had suddenly struck him that just once in his life he wanted to send a card for real. It didn’t matter that the recipient would never know who’d sent it. Well, actually, only the fact that the recipient _wouldn’t_ know who sent it had made the gesture possible. The point was that Castiel was tired of being ‘nice’.   
  
He wanted, just once, to be truly romantic.  
  
He wanted the face that lit up with pleasure on receipt of his card to be that of a man he was more than half in love with, rather than that of the women he felt brotherly concern towards.   
  
Castiel smiled to himself, remembering the dog-eared envelope in Smith’s hand. That hadn’t been an envelope that had spent the day discarded in a desk-drawer. It had been fondled and caressed, its contents furtively withdrawn and fantasized over numerous times. It didn’t matter who Smith’s admirer was. All that mattered was that he’d obviously spent the entire day with a smile on his face, courtesy of Castiel’s card.  
  
Castiel sighed, signaled Lola for another beer and then drank a silent toast to Dean Smith, wherever he was and whatever woman’s bed he was laying in - since a man with a face and body like that sure as hell wasn’t spending the evening alone.  
  
But he wasn’t having such a bad evening himself, he decided reluctantly, as he watched the show. Despite his knowledge that the performers were men, they sure _looked_ like women and, after a few moments of disorientation, he decided it didn’t matter that they were miming rather than singing since they were performing with such panache.  
  
He was a little confused by the second ‘singer’, since she performed an impromptu striptease as she ‘sang’ and ended up wearing nothing more than a skimpy bikini. He appreciated the fact that the tits might be fake, but how the hell ‘she’ was managing to hide ‘her’ plumbing while wearing so little was a mystery that made his own cock and balls ache with sympathy.  
  
He was further confounded when Lola disappeared from behind the bar and appeared a few minutes later center-stage. Up in the spotlight, the fake eyelashes no longer looked ridiculous and the mincing walk transformed into feminine grace. On the stage, Lola was indisputably ‘beautiful’.  
  
And he felt thoroughly ashamed of himself, suddenly, for his earlier thoughts of derision as a new and surprising truth slapped him in the face.  
  
Just as he didn’t have to be camp to be gay, neither did he have any right to feel scorn for gay men who _did_ choose to be camp. Maybe he personally preferred a man who looked like a man, but that didn’t mean these boys who were beautiful enough to pass as women weren’t truly attractive in their own right.  
  
He decided he owed Lola a heartfelt apology and so, as she left the stage, he enthusiastically and unashamedly added his applause to that of the crowd.  
  
“Was I hot, or was I hot?” Lola demanded, as she returned behind the bar with a face flushed with triumph.  
  
“You were hot,” Castiel agreed, with an apologetic smile for his earlier rudeness.  
  
Lola smiled, winked at him, and then leaned across the bar to another drag queen and stage-whispered, “The granite finally cracked. Tell our Princess to get her ass on stage and knock his socks off.”  
  
Castiel downed another two beers in quick succession, too stunned by his own change of perception to pay much more than cursory attention to the next two acts, but then one of the performers grabbed the microphone and announced, “And now what you’ve all been waiting for, the most beautiful, the most talented girl in town. Everyone give a huge round of applause for our very own Princess Deanna.”  
  
He politely clapped his hands along with the rest of the patrons, though his mind was already escaping to a fantasy in which Dean Smith of the gorgeous eyelashes would prance onto the stage and croon sweet valentine nothings into his ears. _Dean_ was a man who’d look as good in a dress as he did in a suit, though he was sure the young Marketing Manager would put a bullet into him for thinking as much.  
  
He blinked at the stage, looked down at his half-empty bottle and decided he was definitely drinking something more potent than beer. Just for a moment he’d thought… no... it was just co-incidence.  
  
Had to be.  
  
He was drunk.  
  
Time to call a cab, go home and pretend he’d never even _imagined_ he’d just thought what he thought he’d seen…  
  
Because there was no way in hell that was _really_ Dean Smith up on that stage looking more goddamned gorgeous than Miss America and singing with a smoky voice,  
  
“Who would ever thought a guy   
Would want a girl like me?   
Who would ever thought that I   
Would fall so easily?”  
  
That voice wasn’t a mime. That husky torch tone was as familiar as sin and twice as tempting.  
  
”Who would ever thought that we   
Would finally come to be?   
I guess they don't know   
How much you mean to me.”  
  
And damned if he, _she_ , wasn’t staring him right in the eyes as he, _she_ , glided down the steps and worked his, _her_ , way through the crowd towards the bar.  
  
”Who would ever thought that they   
Would have some words to say?   
We'll go on anyway   
It's all right, it's okay”  
  
Until he, _she,_ was stood right at the bar with a shimmer in his, _her,_ unmistakable green eyes as he, _she,_ reached into his, _her_ , impossible cleavage and withdrew a battered but all too familiar red envelope.  
  
“Take whatever comes our way   
Together we will stay   
I got three words to say”  
  
He, _she,_ paused, the smoky voice dropping to a mere whisper.  
  
”Never say never”  
  
And he, _she,_ leaned over and brushed a kiss over Castiel’s stunned mouth, then spun away through the crowd, swallowed up in a wave of rapturous applause.  
  
“Look’s like someone wants to be your Valentine,” Lola snickered, passing Castiel a large double malt with a knowing grin.  
  
“Is… um… I mean… um… does Dean…”  
  
“Deanna,” Lola corrected.  
  
Castiel rubbed his face, took a gulp of whiskey, and then nodded weakly. “Does um, Deanna, sing here often?”  
  
“Oh no, honey. She performed just for you,” Lola confided, suddenly compassionate of his obviously shell-shocked state. “First time I’ve ever seen her in a dress, though I gotta say now I know how gorgeous she is I’m going to kick Dean’s butt if he refuses to let her play with us again.”  
  
Castiel skittered somewhat drunkenly through her words, trying to decide whether she was saying Dean was schizophrenic or whether he’d just stumbled on some kind of mysterious inner-circle of gay etiquette. He decided to grasp the most important point. “You’re saying he, I mean she, only sang here tonight because I came here?”  
  
“I’m telling you, girlfriend, Dean was still wearing a leather jacket until I told him you’d stopped looking at me like I was something out of a horror flick. Can you believe that girl then transformed herself into a goddess in less than ten minutes? It’s gotta be love.”  
  
“Love,” Castiel repeated, blinking owlishly over to the dark recesses of the bar where a tall figure in jeans and black leather was wending his way through the crowd in his direction.  
  
“Happy Valentine’s Day,” Dean Smith announced, sliding onto the next bar stool and offering Castiel a nervous grin. Except for the smoky voice and huge, green expressive eyes, nothing remained of Deanna.   
  
“You are one seriously strange individual, Smith,” Castiel announced solemnly, taking another gulp of his whiskey and glaring at Smith with his best surly expression.  
  
A shadow of hurt flickered through the green eyes. “I’ve obviously made a huge mistake,” Smith said tightly. “I’ll call you a cab.”  
  
Castiel let him suffer for a moment, and then cracked a wide smile.  
  
“I’d rather you called me Cas.”  
  
“Cas?” Smith repeated, his expression sliding into helpless confusion.  
  
“Happy Valentine’s Day, Dean,” Castiel growled, and signaled Lola to pour them both a drink.  
  
  


**The End**


End file.
